Fossils, as we typically think of them, tell us about the death of an animal. The teeth, bones, shells, fragmented pseudopods and other weird and wonderful bits of carcass all only ever reflect one thing: a permanent geological ...

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions may not be enough to curb global warming, say Stanford University scientists. The solution could require carbon-negative technologies that actually remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Conservationists say there is only one breeding pair of Hen Harriers left in England and claim numbers have dwindled over the last decade partly because of illegal killing (RT @TinaHood1: BBC - Would changing the law protect Britain's birds of prey?

WWF INDIA, DIRECTOR, CONSERVATION POLICY. Posted on 21 February 2013. Director – Conservation Policy. WWF India is looking for a dynamic and motivated individual to work closely with the current Director of its ...

California's plan for reducing wildfire devastation is both drastic and unnecessary. The current proposal involves the destruction of nearly 38 million acres of land, far more than any wildfire season itself would demolish.

A new video standard enables a fourfold increase in the resolution of TV screens, and an MIT chip was the first to handle it in real time.

It took only a few years for high-definition televisions to make the transition from high-priced novelty to ubiquitous commodity — and they now seem to be heading for obsolescence just as quickly. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several manufacturers debuted new ultrahigh-definition, or UHD, models (also known as 4K or Quad HD) with four times the resolution of today’s HD TVs.

In addition to screens with four times the pixels, however, UHD also requires a new video-coding standard, known as high-efficiency video coding, or HEVC. Also at CES, Broadcom announced the first commercial HEVC chip, which it said will go into volume production in mid-2014.

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week, MIT researchers unveiled their own HEVC chip. The researchers’ design was executed by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, through its University Shuttle Program, and Texas Instruments (TI) funded the chip's development.

Although the MIT chip isn’t intended for commercial release, its developers believe that the challenge of implementing HEVC algorithms in silicon helps illustrate design principles that could be broadly useful. Moreover, “because now we have the chip with us, it is now possible for us to figure out ways in which different types of video data actually interact with hardware,” says Mehul Tikekar, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and one of the paper's co-authors.

Stunning new data not yet publicly released shows Louisiana losing its battle with rising seas much more quickly than even the most pessimistic studies have predicted to date.

While state officials continue to argue over restoration projects to save the state’s sinking, crumbling coast, top researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have concluded that Louisiana is in line for the highest rate of sea-level rise “on the planet.”

The news of NOAA’s new calculations comes on the heels a 2011 U.S. Geological Survey report, which found that coastal Louisiana had lost 1,883 square miles of land between 1932 and 2010 — an area almost the size of the state of Delaware. (See the map at the top of this post.) From 1985 to 2010, the report found a rate of wetland loss amounting to 16.57 square miles every year. That works out to the loss of an area the size of one football field every hour.

Nearly half of that wetland loss occurred in the Terrebonne and Barataria wetland basins. These are home to Terrebonne Parish, source of inspiration to Beasts director Zeitlin, and neighboring Lafourche parish. (The latter was in the news in early January, with reports of cemeteries washing away.)

Will robots put us all out of work? FT Alphaville's Cardiff Garcia and Izabella Kaminska discuss how technology is making jobs obsolete at a historically high rate, and how it may be accelerating.

We had a lot of fun making this short video, which is based on a topic that’s been discussed energetically in the blogosphere and elsewhere for a few months, and which has captured Izabella’s fascination for nearly a year.

In addition to Izzy’s work, we drew on many blog posts and other readings in our discussion, and regrettably we didn’t have time to hat tip everyone in the video itself. We include those links below and thank their authors, and of course any misrepresentations are entirely our fault.

Better than human – Kevin Kelly

Will a robot take your job? – Gary Marcus

Robots and robber barons – Paul Krugman

Myth of the jobless recovery – Matt Yglesias

The end of labor – Timothy Noah

And special thanks go to Andrew Smithers and Martin Ford for the two charts we used in the video.

Another wonderful set of links can be found at Izzy’s tumblr, which you should be reading in any case. And again be sure to check out her beyond scarcity series.

Searching for magnetic monopoles in polar rocks Space Daily The first search for magnetic monopoles in mantle-derived polar igneous rocks - thought to be likely to contain a higher ratio of monopoles to matter - has been conducted by researchers in...

MIT researchers' new method for observing the motion of electron density waves in a superconducting material led to the detection of two different kinds of variations in those waves: amplitude (or intensity) changes and phase changes, shifting the relative positions of peaks and troughs of intensity. These new findings could make it easier to search for new kinds of higher-temperature superconductors.

While the phenomenon of superconductivity — in which some materials lose all resistance to electric currents at extremely low temperatures — has been known for more than a century, the temperature at which it occurs has remained too low for any practical applications. The discovery of “high-temperature” superconductors in the 1980s — materials that could lose resistance at temperatures of up to negative 140 degrees Celsius — led to speculation that a surge of new discoveries might quickly lead to room-temperature superconductors. Despite intense research, these materials have remained poorly understood.

There is still no agreement on a single theory to account for high-temperature superconductivity. Recently, however, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found a new way to study fluctuating charge-density waves, which are the basis for one of the leading theories. The researchers say this could open the door to a better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity, and perhaps prompt new discoveries of higher-temperature superconductors.

This shows MIT researchers' new method for observing the motion of electron density waves in a superconducting material which led to the detection of two different kinds of variations in those waves: amplitude changes and phase changes, shifting the relative positions of peaks and troughs of intensity. These new findings could make it easier to search for new kinds of higher-temperature superconductors.

Regional Director at Fauna & Flora International (FFI), Dr Tony Whitten, shares his grave concern for the wondrous and diverse lifeforms that lurk in the darkness of Asia's karst landscapes. (Welcome to the #Anthropocene.

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